10 Membranes

» Watch the Trans-Siberian Railway. All of it.

Google Maps now lets you watch the Trans-Siberian railway- in real time. Yes, if you are an idiot of tundra sized proportions you can take six or seven days out of your life to watch every second, every flat, monotonous second, of the railway. At one level it’s quite interesting that this now exists; interesting and indeed useful, like knowing that every book, including the crap, pointless ones, are stored in some cave below the Midlands by the British Library. Yet it also begs a number of questions. Is there anything in the world that Google won’t do? In about three years we will only have three companies in the world: Tescos, Google and someone from Big Oil. Maybe some factories in China, but really, they can do it. They can everything. And what is the point of watching it? Or is that not the point, and is the point just to watch the highlights? And is this about anything other than just doing it, the digital-videographic-cartographic equivalent of claiming Everest?